The Service Of Clouds (2 page)

Molloy got out of his car and stood for a long time in the dark quadrangle. The air smelled sweet and mild; there was rain in it and smoke on it. But not the sea here. He lifted his face, to feel the slight movement of the damp air, looked at the steps that led up
to the swing doors, and the lights showing through the yellowing curtains. Thought: There is this night; there will be a few dozen more. After that, I shall not belong here. I will never come to this place again, and in a while the place itself will not be here.

(It was to be demolished, the old buildings were done with now.)

He turned his head quickly, as if it would help him turn his mind from it too. It was unimaginable to him, and painful beyond bearing, though he could have expressed none of it. He looked vaguely into the darkness towards the bushes beside the drive, but saw nothing except old images, revolving and shifting behind his eyes.

When he opened the doors into the hospital, the smell of it drowned him, the smell he had known as the background to his life, every day, every day – scrubbed sluices and antiseptic floors, sheets and sick bowls and the rank stems of flowers, and sweet, faecal decay.

He heard his own footsteps, coughs, the wind sighing suddenly at the door, saw the shaded light at the end of the ward, and felt a great surge of joy and rightness and satisfaction at where he was, and at his own place here, before the bleak misery seeped into the edges of it, souring it, blotting it out.

He put his hand up to the door of the ward and held it there, staring at the shape of his outspread fingers against the wood, and thought suddenly that at the moment of his own dying he might see something so ordinary as this, in the last flaring of the light. Then went on, into the quiet, waiting place.

They had pulled the curtains right round the bed so that, within the narrow cubicle, he was alone with the old woman. They knew better than to come near, or in any other way to disturb him.

It was as though the air was slowly leaking out of her body as she breathed little, shallow breaths, so that she seemed flat beneath the sheet. Her hands were clutched to the cover, as a baby will clutch close to its own face, her skin smooth and almost transparent to the bones below, the flesh already receded.

But she was not dead. The pulse still leapt at the side of her
neck and, now and again, swallowing moved the knotted gristle under the skin of her throat. She was Annie Hare. He knew nothing about her. By the time she had come here, there had been little for him to do, which was so often the way. Only the old came to this place now. It made no difference to him. When his patients were dying, he came to them, sat beside them, watched and waited for death with them, and could not have kept away.

If he was too late, away somewhere, or it happened too suddenly, he felt a frayed, hollow sense of having uncompleted business that would now have to be carried within him forever. Whether they were aware of him or not did not signify, nor what others said or felt. He was called a saint, and a conscientious caring doctor – or else he was thought odd, and his consorting with death disturbed and puzzled them. None of it mattered. No one spoke to him about it. They were not close to him, nor party to his thoughts.

He loved the sense of concentration, like the beam of light from a torch, focused on this spot, the stillness and expectancy, the feeling that everything that had ever been in this one human life was packed now into the smallest space, as he sat quietly on the hard chair, hunched close to the bed. It was unchanging, though the people changed, and where he wanted to be, where he felt rooted and belonging, even if they themselves meant little to him. Every so often, he reached for the claw on the sheet and held it, slipped his thumb over the parchment skin, feeling the thin blade of bone beneath.

He did not enquire about family. If they came, they came. He would not see them, the Sister had to do with all of that. It was none of his concern. This was his concern – the woman in the bed, and her dying, and his own nearness to it. He felt death sidle into the cubicle and settle down to wait a little with him, before moving in.

From the first time, he had felt its absolute importance to him, to sit in silence like this, watching for the tide to turn, and been overwhelmed by the certainty that this small, uninteresting space contained everything of significance. Within it, time shrank to a pinpoint, steadied and was still, the focus of the past, present and
future, at the centre of the turning world. (So that when he left afterwards, he was dazed and bewildered by the ordinariness of life in the streets outside, the unregarding movement sweeping by. He could not get his bearings straight away, but had to go somewhere to be alone, adjusting gradually, like a revenant waking, a traveller returning from long away. As a student, he had walked the night streets in every weather, cycled far out into the hills overlooking the water, or simply stayed on his own bed, staring at the wall, or into the neutral darkness.)

It was not true that death always came quietly, and met with no resistance. But this, tonight, would be quiet, and so he would simply sit by, watch, wait.

The wind caught at the casement suddenly and shook it by the throat to gain entrance, and, once it was there, prowled about the old, half-empty building, pushing at doors, lifting floorboards a little, restlessly, and like the wind, the old woman, Annie Hare, moaned and shifted on the pillow. Her nose was hooked like the beak of a bird, the flesh seemed to be dissolving as he watched. The skin was taut across her forehead.

And the wind raced across the roof and keened in cracks and probed with thin fingers beneath slates, and out in the ward, some slight movement, a voice, a demand attended to. Silence again. The Sister sat at the desk within the circle of light.

The girl had been sent down to the store, two flights of stone stairs, past closed doors, which unnerved her, but in a different way from the presence of the dying. She could endure being spooked, like a child would be, by mere shadows and hollows and empty corridors.

The wind dropped, gathered itself again. But the next gust came to nothing, and the building fell quiet.

Molloy shifted heavily on his chair. He was watching intently, sensing some slight change, seeing the old woman’s breathing subside. He touched her hand. ‘Annie Hare,’ he said softly, for reassurance, encouragement. There was a response, the faintest stir within her like an electrical charge, just perceptible to him.

‘Annie Hare.’

What he was doing for her, in what way he was assisting her,
he could not have said, but that it was so he never doubted. She was not left alone, he had made sure of it, for her, as for all the others, that was the point and purpose of his work – his existence, even.

His mother had been alone, and all these deaths since could never make reparation for it. But his own intense satisfaction in death’s presence, his craving for it, was something quite other, quite separate, and of no concern to those he sat beside for company.

Somewhere, beyond the cubicle, beyond the ward, someone dropped a metal dish, and the sound went on, like a coin running round and round and down a tube, reverberating until everything else gave way to it for those moments. And after that sound, the wind blew again, as if at a signal.

He looked intently at the yellow, beaky face, the downy hair sprouting in tufts from the old skull, the claw upon the sheet beside him. The sound had not reached her. He put out his hand, covered hers with it, and felt the stream flow out and away, leaving the stream-bed empty. Dry. Then time stopped and was held suspended in pure and stunning silence, and with it, Molloy held his own breath, before the wind, snaking under the far door, puffed out the curtain surrounding the death bed. He folded her hands with care on top of each other, left them empty, and went away.

His mother’s christened name had been Florence Hennessy, and she had become Flora Molloy.

She had hated the first name from childhood, though, until she was ten, she had suffered it, not knowing any other way, and, from her family, continued to suffer it until she left them.

‘That was the name we gave you. That was the name your father chose,’ her mother had said, as if the business had nothing at all to do with the girl. ‘You are Florence.’

But when she reached the secondary school, she had announced herself from the first day as Flora. And, as the school was in a town twelve miles away to the north, and not the one to which everyone else from their village and its surrounding district went, she was able to begin this part of her life on a new page, with perfect success.

She felt herself to be two people, and that was her salvation.

Only when school reports and occasional correspondence to her home wrote of her as ‘Flora’ did the two lives, the two girls, come into conflict.

‘You are
Florence
Hennessy. I will not have this. It is not up to you to change your own name. Why do you insist on telling such a lie?’

‘It is not a lie.’

‘It is not the truth. Flora is not your name.’

‘I like it best.’

‘Why? Why?’

Her mother had written to the school. ‘She is to be called by her proper, christened name of Florence. We do not approve of the name she has given herself. She is not of an age to make such a decision.’

She had torn the letter into small, even fragments on the bus and during the course of the day dropped them, one or two at a time, into different waste paper baskets around the school.

The Hennessys had once been quite significant farmers. Her grandfather had owned more than seven hundred acres, all the land up towards Doyne and Ballymunty. They were ‘gentleman farmers’, May Hennessy said, people of note in the whole district, they had horses and pony traps, they had hunted, they had even been able to travel abroad and stay at hotels, they kept accounts, not merely at local shops but in the smart department stores of the city.

It was not any mismanagement or financial trouble which brought them gradually low, simply ill-health. From grandfather to father to son, the men were not robust. Heart trouble, kidney trouble, tuberculosis led to weaknesses and disability, and the need for a succession of treatments. It was none of it their fault, and so they believed that, in spite of having lost land and property bit by bit, relinquished it reluctantly by selling here and there to neighbours, Hennessys had nevertheless somehow retained their status, and the respect of the community. They no longer farmed seven hundred acres, no longer employed dozens of men, no longer lived in the biggest house for miles around and had tenants in half a dozen cottages, too, and yet, somehow, they suspended disbelief in their new, reduced situation; in their own eyes, they were gentlemen farmers, landlords, squires, people of some importance.

By the time Florence was born, the loss of most of the land and property was two generations away. Her father, John Joseph Hennessy, was the grandson and third male in a line to suffer deteriorating health, so that his daughter never knew him other
than as an invalid. As a small child, she had spent time with him, sitting on the floor beside the chair, which was pulled up close to the hearth, and in which he spent most of his day, wrapped in a plaid rug. But although fond of her, he found the restless company and chatter of a small child irritating and tiring and, learning that quickly, she retreated, not to her mother, but into herself, where she patiently began to build an iron will and reserves of determination and strength of character, but in secret, aware of the potential value to her of such a carefully harboured resource.

She was a self-sufficient, quick, observant and contented child. She understood her father’s situation, and felt sorry for him, in a detached though affectionate way. But she was not privy to his thoughts nor he to hers, and both were happy that this should be so.

There was some land left, mainly for sheep grazing, but they lived away from the farm, in a severe, dull house, surrounded by an acre of uninteresting garden, just off the road to the village. She could remember her father going out in boots and a cap to the fields with one of the black and white dogs, and driving with him in the trap to market. But that had been almost four years before. Now, he sat in the chair, beside the fire in winter, near the window in summer, a thin, sallow man with a small moustache and pale, grey-blue eyes and receding hair, and with always a handkerchief in his hand, ready for when he coughed, and sometimes a faint blueness about the mouth.

She went to the school in the village, and disregarded her mother’s lesson about their being in some way apart from, and superior to, the ordinary children, quite able from an early age to see through pretensions and fantasies to the plain truth. She played with whatever companions of the moment favoured her, always amicable, never close, and at home spent her time by herself. She was a solemn, rather beautiful child, very tall for her age and curiously unlike either parent, though with a certain Hennessy fragility about the skin beneath her eyes. Her inner life was rich, complex and satisfying to her, her outer life reserved, calm and uneventful. She took little notice of the dramas and
emotional atmospheres that eddied from time to time about her parents and their concerns. What she thought about the future, even as a small girl, was that it would mean not only adulthood but freedom and independence, for she had always had an innate sense of not properly belonging to this place, these people. It had nothing to do with unhappiness, nor with love or its lack, it was a simple fact, this sense of otherness and detachment, just as she was a child who played willingly with others and yet, when she turned her back, forgot and did not think of them at all.